How to do query auto-completion/suggestions in Lucene?

Based on @Alexandre Victoor’s answer, I wrote a little class based on the Lucene Spellchecker in the contrib package (and using the LuceneDictionary included in it) that does exactly what I want.

This allows re-indexing from a single source index with a single field, and provides suggestions for terms. Results are sorted by the number of matching documents with that term in the original index, so more popular terms appear first. Seems to work pretty well 🙂

import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.Reader;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.Iterator;
import java.util.List;
import java.util.Map;

import org.apache.lucene.analysis.Analyzer;
import org.apache.lucene.analysis.ISOLatin1AccentFilter;
import org.apache.lucene.analysis.LowerCaseFilter;
import org.apache.lucene.analysis.StopFilter;
import org.apache.lucene.analysis.TokenStream;
import org.apache.lucene.analysis.ngram.EdgeNGramTokenFilter;
import org.apache.lucene.analysis.ngram.EdgeNGramTokenFilter.Side;
import org.apache.lucene.analysis.standard.StandardFilter;
import org.apache.lucene.analysis.standard.StandardTokenizer;
import org.apache.lucene.document.Document;
import org.apache.lucene.document.Field;
import org.apache.lucene.index.CorruptIndexException;
import org.apache.lucene.index.IndexReader;
import org.apache.lucene.index.IndexWriter;
import org.apache.lucene.index.Term;
import org.apache.lucene.search.IndexSearcher;
import org.apache.lucene.search.Query;
import org.apache.lucene.search.ScoreDoc;
import org.apache.lucene.search.Sort;
import org.apache.lucene.search.TermQuery;
import org.apache.lucene.search.TopDocs;
import org.apache.lucene.search.spell.LuceneDictionary;
import org.apache.lucene.store.Directory;
import org.apache.lucene.store.FSDirectory;

/**
 * Search term auto-completer, works for single terms (so use on the last term
 * of the query).
 * <p>
 * Returns more popular terms first.
 * 
 * @author Mat Mannion, [email protected]
 */
public final class Autocompleter {

    private static final String GRAMMED_WORDS_FIELD = "words";

    private static final String SOURCE_WORD_FIELD = "sourceWord";

    private static final String COUNT_FIELD = "count";

    private static final String[] ENGLISH_STOP_WORDS = {
    "a", "an", "and", "are", "as", "at", "be", "but", "by",
    "for", "i", "if", "in", "into", "is",
    "no", "not", "of", "on", "or", "s", "such",
    "t", "that", "the", "their", "then", "there", "these",
    "they", "this", "to", "was", "will", "with"
    };

    private final Directory autoCompleteDirectory;

    private IndexReader autoCompleteReader;

    private IndexSearcher autoCompleteSearcher;

    public Autocompleter(String autoCompleteDir) throws IOException {
        this.autoCompleteDirectory = FSDirectory.getDirectory(autoCompleteDir,
                null);

        reOpenReader();
    }

    public List<String> suggestTermsFor(String term) throws IOException {
        // get the top 5 terms for query
        Query query = new TermQuery(new Term(GRAMMED_WORDS_FIELD, term));
        Sort sort = new Sort(COUNT_FIELD, true);

        TopDocs docs = autoCompleteSearcher.search(query, null, 5, sort);
        List<String> suggestions = new ArrayList<String>();
        for (ScoreDoc doc : docs.scoreDocs) {
            suggestions.add(autoCompleteReader.document(doc.doc).get(
                    SOURCE_WORD_FIELD));
        }

        return suggestions;
    }

    @SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
    public void reIndex(Directory sourceDirectory, String fieldToAutocomplete)
            throws CorruptIndexException, IOException {
        // build a dictionary (from the spell package)
        IndexReader sourceReader = IndexReader.open(sourceDirectory);

        LuceneDictionary dict = new LuceneDictionary(sourceReader,
                fieldToAutocomplete);

        // code from
        // org.apache.lucene.search.spell.SpellChecker.indexDictionary(
        // Dictionary)
        IndexReader.unlock(autoCompleteDirectory);

        // use a custom analyzer so we can do EdgeNGramFiltering
        IndexWriter writer = new IndexWriter(autoCompleteDirectory,
        new Analyzer() {
            public TokenStream tokenStream(String fieldName,
                    Reader reader) {
                TokenStream result = new StandardTokenizer(reader);

                result = new StandardFilter(result);
                result = new LowerCaseFilter(result);
                result = new ISOLatin1AccentFilter(result);
                result = new StopFilter(result,
                    ENGLISH_STOP_WORDS);
                result = new EdgeNGramTokenFilter(
                    result, Side.FRONT,1, 20);

                return result;
            }
        }, true);

        writer.setMergeFactor(300);
        writer.setMaxBufferedDocs(150);

        // go through every word, storing the original word (incl. n-grams) 
        // and the number of times it occurs
        Map<String, Integer> wordsMap = new HashMap<String, Integer>();

        Iterator<String> iter = (Iterator<String>) dict.getWordsIterator();
        while (iter.hasNext()) {
            String word = iter.next();

            int len = word.length();
            if (len < 3) {
                continue; // too short we bail but "too long" is fine...
            }

            if (wordsMap.containsKey(word)) {
                throw new IllegalStateException(
                        "This should never happen in Lucene 2.3.2");
                // wordsMap.put(word, wordsMap.get(word) + 1);
            } else {
                // use the number of documents this word appears in
                wordsMap.put(word, sourceReader.docFreq(new Term(
                        fieldToAutocomplete, word)));
            }
        }

        for (String word : wordsMap.keySet()) {
            // ok index the word
            Document doc = new Document();
            doc.add(new Field(SOURCE_WORD_FIELD, word, Field.Store.YES,
                    Field.Index.UN_TOKENIZED)); // orig term
            doc.add(new Field(GRAMMED_WORDS_FIELD, word, Field.Store.YES,
                    Field.Index.TOKENIZED)); // grammed
            doc.add(new Field(COUNT_FIELD,
                    Integer.toString(wordsMap.get(word)), Field.Store.NO,
                    Field.Index.UN_TOKENIZED)); // count

            writer.addDocument(doc);
        }

        sourceReader.close();

        // close writer
        writer.optimize();
        writer.close();

        // re-open our reader
        reOpenReader();
    }

    private void reOpenReader() throws CorruptIndexException, IOException {
        if (autoCompleteReader == null) {
            autoCompleteReader = IndexReader.open(autoCompleteDirectory);
        } else {
            autoCompleteReader.reopen();
        }

        autoCompleteSearcher = new IndexSearcher(autoCompleteReader);
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        Autocompleter autocomplete = new Autocompleter("/index/autocomplete");

        // run this to re-index from the current index, shouldn't need to do
        // this very often
        // autocomplete.reIndex(FSDirectory.getDirectory("/index/live", null),
        // "content");

        String term = "steve";

        System.out.println(autocomplete.suggestTermsFor(term));
        // prints [steve, steven, stevens, stevenson, stevenage]
    }

}